Bought it last weekend (on the 360) and started playing it yesterday. Graphics are beautiful. I'm in awe of the landscapes and the views. Combat plays quite well. The thing that is irking me at the moment is when I run across low-res textures for small items that I KNOW would have taken up very little disk space and fit on the 360's disk (sign posts for one).

The first thing I do with every game as soon as I open it is install to the HDD. At least my main machine is a 360 s. The disk drive on this thing, while not as quiet as the PS3, is at least much better than the old form factor used to be.

I like outsdoor assaults while hacking away like Conan with a two handed weapon. It's nice to have a follower that has archery skills if you go two handed. Hard to see the NPCs on the stairs with the reduced size but at that range, you can see the arrows coming and side step them sometimes. It just feels better in combat knowing something isn't an automatic hit or miss. Target lock would suck in this game. This is from early on in the game near Whiterun.

I pumped points into Heavy Armor and am up to taking 80% more damage while wearing it. I also loaded up on Two Handed perks and have a chance to behead opponents and also get double crits on sprinting power attacks which make me feel even more like Conan as I make my initial charge. If I hit with my first power swing, I do serious damage, but the great thing is I don't always hit, I whiff, like in real combat and just as it should be, takes me awhile to re-swing my two handed weapon again.

I downloaded a mod to get rid fo the blockiness seen on faces as well as replacing them with 2048x2048 textures (that's like eleventybillion times higher than WoW) My screenshot wasnt' saved at a very high quality with fraps. I also need to turn up my AA.

miir wrote:Why would anyone not install 360 games on the HD?
The optical drives on the 360 are so bloody loud I think I'd lose my mind if I had to listen to mine spinning and thrashing constantly.

Would be nice if the PS3 had that option... but at least the BluRay drive is quiet.

A lot of Xbox 360s don't have hard drives.

Usually with PS3 games there's an option to install things like textures to the HD. Unless it doesn't grant a performance or loading time boost, in which case they don't. Blu ray tends to stream from discs better than DVD.

I thought kiting broke the game, but christ Enchanting and Smithing fuck everything up. Sitting around L40 with maxed enchanting and smithing, running around with full dragonscale double enchanted so that expert destruction spells cost something like 5 mana to doublecast and my 2h weapon damage is like 126 before the damage proc kicks in. The power from tradeskilling isn't the issue, its the relative ease that it took to get capped out with those skills, given how much I hate grinding in games. Also, why are Dragons easier to kill than fucking bandit chiefs and cave bears?

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Amp up the difficulty if you've spent that much time gearing up. The game isn't really designed at normal to be maxed out like that. Todd Howard said the pace of the game is set so you can cruise along the main quest and do some faction stuff and beat it around level 15-20.

Tried that and it just makes the problem worse, since skill ups come faster. In fact, the only major change I saw in raising the difficulty is that mages tend to one shot you if warding is not up. On the other hand, putting the slider up to master does not change the fact that you can duck and chain stagger nukes with your caster and move in with the two hander and rape the Dragon while he is flopping on the ground like a fish out of water. Meanwhile, Bandit Overlords go up to five million hit points and start resembling FF Online super long grind fests. So, I am torn on the difficulty thing, since it does not make the core game any harder beyond adding a few zeros to some numbers.

Again, love playing this game, just wish the difficulty curve was smoother than "Enchant/Smith and rape face -OR- struggle with crap you scrounge off the vendors". It would help the immersion considerably if Dragons were among the hardest things to kill, rather than the easiest. Granted, my highly focused Tank/Mage/2h Dark Elf with capped Ench/Smithing might have something to do with that. Its kind of to the point where I dread having to enter bandit lairs, but if I see a dragon I run over because I want to kill it myself for the easier destruction and archery skill ups.

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

As big as the game is with all the side quests and open world things, it's hard to balance the game I'm sure. I don't think the game is designed for power leveling.

Edit: if you wanted to do that. You could just beat on the very first NPC you run into after picking up your weapon and max your one or two hand ability and anything else since the NPC guide will never die if you don't take all his HPs and let him recover for another beating. Later you can beat on a companion that's required for a quest and continuously beat on them to max your skills if that's what you want.

I did not really set out to powerlevel, in fact the only online knowledge I have had of this game came entirely from this thread. But I guess I sort of wound up falling into one of the power builds of the game (stealth rape being the other, I hear) because it fit the concept of what I was setting out to do. Comming from the Souls games did not help, either, as I have this mentality of not wasting any resources and being extremely diligent about upgrades when the level of paranoia is probably not needed in this game. Hope they fix the quest bugs because it would be nice to not have to drag around 10 pounds of undroppable shit I cannot do anything with.

Still, its a good game and runs very well on my PS3, probably thanks to the better hard drives my wife and I installed in ours.

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Yeah I have smithing maxed, not quite enchanting yet, but agree. I have yet to fight a dragon that was challenging, but I can't beat draugr deathlords (I think those are the type that are typically mini bosses) for the life of me unless I kite it for 30 minutes.

Ive found that the slow down time shout can trivialize a lot of encounters too.

haha Im level 40 and I still have not gone to see the guys about the shout power, so I have like one ability I can use? Guess I should do that....

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Yeah, I will never see that stuff since I am playing it on the PS3. But I like the relative security and stability of playing on console (and the UI is not as nightmarish, though still bad). I understand the reasons for some of the balancing issues, I just wish they did not exist at immersion breaking levels, but they had to make the main quest easy enough for the crowd who are not RPG regulars (read: Xbox shooter crowd) who are used to sidequesting to prep for the final battle.

Again, great game, it just seems like there are some really simple balance changes they could have done to really help with the imersion. I think the difficulty thing is probably unsolvable, however. The pathing is just terrible and the NPCs already autotrack you from miles away like they have the target lock the player lacks, so I am not sure how you increase the difficulty since improving the AI is not really an option. I know there are three main things I would do for balance if I were on the Bethesda team, however. First, I would cap tradeskill effectiveness at 100 no matter how much +% skill mods you try and stack on top. The skill enhancers should be there to help people who are sub 100 and not be abusable to make retardedly broken gear. Second, I would make certain combines and spells trivial out at certain skill levels, but greatly improve the gain rate on level relavent spells and combines. This would encourage some variety of spell use and trade item design. Its simply retarded that I can literally spend two hours cranking out absorb life daggers in Whiterun and max out two tradeskills, but spamming thunderbolt for two hours gets me three points in Destruction. Finally, I would soft cap the +% gained for skills and damage from tradeskill items at around 50% (maybe a 1 per 10 diminishing returns rate after that) for everything. This would make things easier to balance, while making some of the dropped items more valid. It would also encourage some diversity in enchantments and prevent the whole "I can spam this entire school of magic for free" issue.

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

kyoukan wrote:there's probably a better way to balance stuff than just amping up their HP and damage

Too many games use this very simple and boring crutch. The original StarCraft had different levels of AI (like Insane), that actually changed build orders and how the enemy AI played. More games should change what the AI actually does instead of just making them harder to kill. Having varied behavior at different skill levels would also give more incentive to replay at higher difficulty levels.

I disagree... I've found that most games actually have different UI routines/scripts for different difficulty levels.
Increased accuracy, better use of cover, different mob skillsets or even using advanced tactics like cover fire and flanking.
In Crysis, when you uppped the difficulty, the Korean soldiers actually spoke Korean so you couldn't use audio cues to figure out what they were doing (unless you understand Korean).

Bethesda seems to be one of the few developers who don't seem to put much effort into tweaking the challenge in the difficulty settings. Since their games tend to be such massive, open ended games... I imagine tweaking the behavior and scripts for the obscene amount of potential encounters would be a bit overwhelming.

For those on the PC, the creation kit will be released in January, so expect to see content mods being released a few weeks after that. In other news, the 1.2 patch introduced a rare dragon that flies backwards. They certainly rushed that patch.

Mage quest line bugged out on me right at the point where I come back to tell the archmage about the staff and the elf takes over the main room. Fucking unfixable bug too. Can't believe they left such an obvious problem with a main questline in. Maybe it gets patched, but who knows...

In other news, weapon damage with boost enchants makes magic obsolete, aside from AEing rooms of trash. I am not even abusing the alchemy crap, just a bunch of grand soul enchants on my gear and I am sitting at something stupid like 250 per swing with my glass greatsword (before procs) and rocking AC cap in light armor. Despite the resistance bug they patched in (+ resist actually equals - resist), I am still crushing anything that isn't a wizard in combat, sans shield, and at this point (level 47) most of the opposition is running around in glass armor and swinging ebony weapons at me. I think an Ancient Dragon actually made me use a potion last night, though, so they might have finally started getting harder than a cave bear.

Balance and bugs aside, I am enjoying this game a lot, though. Being a lawful evil Dark Elf Mage Tank is a pretty good way to progress the story in this game.

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Jice Virago wrote:Tried that and it just makes the problem worse, since skill ups come faster. In fact, the only major change I saw in raising the difficulty is that mages tend to one shot you if warding is not up. On the other hand, putting the slider up to master does not change the fact that you can duck and chain stagger nukes with your caster and move in with the two hander and rape the Dragon while he is flopping on the ground like a fish out of water. Meanwhile, Bandit Overlords go up to five million hit points and start resembling FF Online super long grind fests. So, I am torn on the difficulty thing, since it does not make the core game any harder beyond adding a few zeros to some numbers.

Again, love playing this game, just wish the difficulty curve was smoother than "Enchant/Smith and rape face -OR- struggle with crap you scrounge off the vendors". It would help the immersion considerably if Dragons were among the hardest things to kill, rather than the easiest. Granted, my highly focused Tank/Mage/2h Dark Elf with capped Ench/Smithing might have something to do with that. Its kind of to the point where I dread having to enter bandit lairs, but if I see a dragon I run over because I want to kill it myself for the easier destruction and archery skill ups.

Maybe using destruction spells change it, but as a 1h \ shield user with fully dragonplate, fully upgraded with smithing, and double enchanted, some of the ancient dragons can still knock me pretty low quickly if they catch me in a bad area.

I've already beat the game, and can rock every other kind of dragon without a problem...and I can rape the ancient dragons as well, but if they catch you in some of the mountain areas they will not land and will go over you using breath that can knock you from full to dead in one breath. I have magic resist on every item that can have it, with around 400 health, and they take me to around 20% in one breath if I don't use my shield.

Before I maxed enchanting and remade a new set of dragonbone with double enchants, I had to be VERY careful with ancient dragons because they would often gib me randomly with a partial breath. Very annoying when they just flew over the top of a mountain and blew me up as I was running.

What's the easiest way to level enchanting? I think I'm level 30ish, and maxed Blacksmithing last night (finally made Dragon armor, that made life a lot easier), but I think I'm only around 50 enchanting.

Make a few hundred iron daggers (if you didn't save them from blacksmithing) enchant them with paralyze or banish enchant (banish is best but its rare to find; paralyze is more common). Enchant a good sword with soul trap and just run around hitting everything. The level of gem you use doesn't effect your XP towards the next level. Repeat until 100 enchanting. It's mostly a grind because the interface is terrible.

You can also run around to every mage shop and buy all their filled soul gems. They are a little pricey but the iron daggers you're cranking out should be worth about 1000 gold each.

Buy every petty soul gem with or without souls on every vendor you know stocks them (mage college is great for this) and make a weapon with the soul trap enchant on it. Go out into the wilderness and kill every small animal that moves to fill the empties. Then enchant all of those iron daggers you shat out for smithing with any enchantment. Sell them for zillion % proffit. Repeat process every two days the vendors restock. It took me two or three hours to cap enchanting and that was while actively working on other quests. When taking things from the tree, stick with the middle road up to double enchant, as the damage from elemental enchants is so meaningless compared to the base damage you do with the weapons anyhow. Plus, its better to have paralysis enchants on your weapons so you can stunlock entire groups of enemies with your 2h sweep attacks, anyhow. Stamina Damage and Paralysis are the best mele enchants you can put on a weapon thats not intended for "LOL Backstab!" use.

A word of warning, though, hiting double enchant in the tree will make the game really trivial in a lot of ways and pretty much assure that anything you craft will far outstrip anything you find. I am walking around in full legendary dragonscale with mods to reduce destruction cost, increase two hand damage, and a couple random sneak and lockpick mods, plus I have jewelry swaps for crafting and pick pocketting. I have a batsuit for archery in my house for when I cap 2h skill and start working archery, as well. My bow does around 180 damage per shot, with its procs included but before arrow damage, and I have yet so see anything close enough to consider changing it. I carry two 2h swords, one with combat enchants and the other with soul and mana stealing for gobbling wizards into my black soul gems. This is all gear I have had for around 20 levels and its so good compared to what I have found that I have stopped collecting anything that does not contribute to my alchemy and fund my training sessions. This is ok if you do not like the whole rummaging through loot aspect of RPGs, but it does kill imersion and take the carrot away in a lot of respects.

@Asheran-
The talent in destruction that lets you stagger anything you double cast makes destruction retarded, especially when combined with the enchants that make the spells cost no mana. I can stunlock ancient dragons in mid air, if I want. With maxed destruction, I drop Ancients in about 10-15 dual casts of Thunderbolt, but it could take 100 and it would not matter thanks to the no mana plus stunlock thing. Even without that, its trivial to just to use moderate cover and warding/healing spells and facerape them with an enchanted bow. I also am using the follower you get from the Azura Shrine quest and man is she good. She is a master destruction and conjuration wizard with stupid amounts of mana regen and high enough stealth that she has the ninja roll talent. Probably the most hassle free companion in the game, and she actually carries more stuff than most thanks to not wearing any armor. She actually puts the hurt on dragons and I learned that warding works on the breath by watching her tank a dragon.

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
--RICHARD M. NIXON, "REAL PEACE" (1983)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Apparently when I read this yesterday, I skipped over the part that said "enchant with banish". I tried it with a few of the other enchants that I currently have, and daggers were selling for like 75ish. Now I just need to find something with the banish enchant that I can disenchant.

Check out the free Dragon Shout app for your iPhone/iPad. It's an interactive map that lets you make notes all over Skyrim. Some cool fetures look to be getting added, like the ability to see public notes and share information with others.

I think I outleveled the game. There really isn't much of a challenge when you can four-shot an elder dragon without sneak. Maybe I should come up with weird rules from now on... "You can only use conjuration magic on this quest" or something.

IT'S HARD TO PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT; SOMETHING IS WRONG
I'M LIKE THE UNCLE WHO HUGGED YOU A LITTLE TOO LONG

Drolgin Steingrinder wrote:I think I outleveled the game. There really isn't much of a challenge when you can four-shot an elder dragon without sneak. Maybe I should come up with weird rules from now on... "You can only use conjuration magic on this quest" or something.

That's the biggest challenge with Skyrim. It's easy to become powerful quickly which kind of ruins the rest of the game a bit. Some people will always power level but with Skyrim, even for those just out to enjoy the game, you gain levels/perks/etc too quickly for the huge amount of content that's available.

Perhaps they should implement some sort of overall auto mob difficulty increase depending on your level for dungeon areas to keep things challenging and make it a game option to activate it.

That was the big problem with Oblivion. You'd have bandits in full glass armor wielding ebony blades when you reached higher levels. That and it took 40 minutes to kill one guy with a bow. I feel like they overshot the mark in terms of trying to balance it the other way. Oh well, luckily players have released mods to give players a more customizable experience, and with the release of the creation kit in a few weeks we'll start getting even more.

For PC players, here is a mod released by someone who has been modding since Morrowind. It's important to note that there are some things he cannot do yet since the CK hasn't been released, but overall there are a number of things touched in this mod that will address some of the difficulty issues (or lack thereof) that you've been having.